When they had done, Jon put a brotherly arm around Freddy’s shoulder and gave him one last piece of advice as the three men left the floor, “Remember, whatever you do, don’t let go of that chain after you throw it or you’ll loose your wraps, and worse, when Jesse hits that cathead, it’ll whip around like crazy and you’ll scare the piss out of poor old Harper.”
A couple of hours later, they were back up on the floor for another connection and Freddy made his first throw. The chain did not leap into position making tight wraps as it had for Jon but hopped feebly to the top joint wrapping twice tightly and once loosely, and Jesse was careful not to spin the cathead as violently as usual. The tongs also needed to be applied one additional time for good measure, but the connection was made and Freddy hadn’t fucked up after all; that was the main thing.
THE DUST RAISED BY JON’S Oldsmobile as he and Freddy rocketed away from location had long settled when Zak finally wheeled his Jeep around and rumbled down rig road headed for home. He was taking his time. He felt strange, disoriented. He pulled off down that rancher’s private drive and his headlights threw a bright moving bubble of light across the big dark house and barn. The prairie trail looked so different at night. Several times he slowed to a crawl and basically just guessed if he was still on the right path. At last he came to the outhouse by the creek. Four trees, forming a windbreak there, silhouetted eerily against the starry night. He tossed his sleeping bag into the tent, and, without premeditation, stripped naked and walked down to the water. He stood with arms outstretched. He closed his eyes, breathed slowly and deeply, and listened as spirited gusts of wind swept the clanging, banging, screaming, clattering noises of the day from his head, stirred the restless lonely trees abruptly while playful, prankish, zephyrean fingers teased his taut and weary skin, stroking him with a long cool hypnotic caress, raising goosebumps. His scrotum and nipples tightened. Hanks of hair lifted from his neck and brow. He stepped into the chill creek water, ten inches deep at its rushing center, sat down, lay back against the smooth rocks, and burrowed his buttocks into the sand. He completely relaxed beneath the brilliant cold stars. As his body grew accustomed to the cold clear water rushing over him, he breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth. He urinated. He emptied his mind as well as his bladder into the jetting stream of the dark merciful night. After several moments, his body said enough, and he sat up, using handfuls of creek sand to grind away the grime from his day’s work. He emerged without shivering, dried off, and wrapped himself in a woolen blanket from the back of his Jeep, rolled a reefer, and sat down on the grass overlooking the gully that wound and stretched away between the swollen mounds of earth that rose up like buffalo humps beyond the creek.
He leaned back on his elbows and faced the sky, all the while keeping company with the long, black tree limbs that gently waved across his field of vision. The wind washed over him with an erratic rhythm, in waves that made him tingle, as though the tempest itself had been made capricious at having found him and his unlikely trees, waiting there in the midst of all this bleak and desolate nothingness. It rewarded him with sound, a distant elegiac echo. Its singing but a small part of this chorus that filled his ears and excited his heart. What was it? A bird? Some desperate or lonely animal? That echo accented other sounds, the movement and energy was all about him invisible, yet very present. His senses were lured by all. There was no longer the phony separation between his senses, his intellect, and his spirit. He had felt the cleansing undeniable stream as it coursed its velvet smoothness over his body, over the submissive eroding earth. He could hear the snorting intake of air and water by some animal a few hundred feet away, as though he were growing some new kind of eyes, eyes that needed only the suggestion of light.
Suddenly, he understood the strange feeling he had had on the way home but couldn’t then verbalize. It was calm. That day’s tower had presented no immediate life-and-death situations, and he was becoming comfortable with his new persona forming. Indeed, he was changing. He could not lament the death of his old self, for it had died too long ago. He had been carrying around a stinking corpse while believing the lie that life is death. That the putrid odor of his decaying soul was somehow sweet and narcotic. Whenever this urge to change course had commenced in him before, it had caused him fear, anger, and at those times he had lashed out viciously to protect himself, his status. The suggestion, or threat, that he was but as yet unformed, insubstantial, only half a man, and the tricks he had been taught to convince himself it was not so, now all lay exposed as the merest fakery and conceit. He was now many miles down a different road. Although he might look back, that which he had left was, as of this minute, completely out of sight.
An animal down the creek a ways thumped off slowly when he had drunk his fill. Zak wondered what it might have been. He was completely unconcerned for his safety, as he had nothing that the creature might want. He felt everything that moved or also felt and was a part of this vast scene that seemed vibrant, electric, and teeming with life. The season was changing. He could feel the subtle differences in the air, in the ebb and flow of the currents and chemicals around him. The moon and the stars that shone on the water in the creek and across the coarse, rolling, grassy surface of the land caused a reflection, not so much from the rippling liquid surface but from the entire illuminated depth of field. The currents swept through him like a natural coagulant that fused him to the surrounding scene. The gentle shiver that ran through his rib cage tied him to the quivering moment, impelling him to voice a medicine song in answer to it. Not a mantra that would engrain it to his being—for they were strangely separate—but a response, an articulation of another kind that states the willful elements in common and those too that set him apart. We are all here, we are all temporary, yet we are forever; we will all willingly perish to give this great difference meaning, so that some other thing may rise from this loneliness and, too, succeed in becoming. He thought none of these things in words, but he felt them and knew them at once.
He thought about two kinds of death. One that is good, that makes way for new things—like he was a new thing—and the other, the death caused by selfishness. When selfishness kills it stands in the way and nothing new becomes. Wasted. How appropriate, he thought, that the vernacular of his time had adopted that word for selfish death for murder. It seemed evil to have that profound understanding and not change. To compel the truth to lie. To compel anything to reflect and then become its own hideous contradiction. He understood, too, that there are other forms of death that he was as yet unaware of. He tried to find a tone that would state his case harmoniously to all that was placed around him. That would differentiate him and yet declare his solidarity. At first it was just a sound that came from deep within his belly and up into his chest. When he found a tone that didn’t drown out this sense of life and place he held in his ears, his mouth opened, and his throat and lips fluttered with the very vibration of it. After you have journeyed out into the universe and have perceived that it exists, you must bring that perception back with you and it must blend with that little universe in which you have chosen to spawn. The water in the creek, the wind, the trees, the rolling plains of grass were singing. His mouth formed words that no human ever sang or spoke, though he was not the first to find such words, for they have always been on the tips of tongues.
V
The last time Zak saw Calico O’Mally they spent a day together in Grand Forks, North Dakota, getting the Jeep in shape. They checked the belts and hoses, changed the plugs, removed the catalytic converter, and put on new heavy-duty shocks. Then they moved on to the interior, and Calico helped Zak unbolt and remove the bench seat from the back. “This’ll make me a great living room sofa,” Calico laughed, and, indeed, when they had done, they lugged it up the stairs to his apartment, mounted it to some cinderblocks, draped an Indian blanket over the entire setup, and placed a lamp overlooking one shoulder. “My homework couch!” it was duly commissioned.
“And you have a place to stow your gear, hell, you can even sleep in there,” Calico said, referring to the neat square hole in the back of the Jeep where the seat had been. On the floor in the front, O’Mally found Zak’s book box filled with cassette tapes and assorted reading matter. Calico picked through the cassette tapes, throwing the good ones in a paper sack—Dylan, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, Johnny Winter—and threw the rest, including books—the Viking Portables by Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson—all in the trash. “If any roughnecks see you readin’ and listenin’ to any of this shit they’ll think you’re strange for sure,” he warned. These were replaced with David Allan Coe, Waylon & Willie, Johnny Cash, and Steve Goodman.
As night had fallen, they moved back upstairs and Zak opened a fresh bottle of Dewar’s scotch.
“That Jeep is ready for anything,” they agreed.
They sat on a rug in the center of the room and toasted Zak’s adventure long into the night. At one point Calico dug through a closet and found a couple of duffel bags where he kept his rig gear. Out came two hard hats, one barely used, both a dark red, one with little or no markings, the other completely plastered over with stickers from the various companies he had hired out with. “You don’t want this one,” Calico said of the latter, “you’re a worm and you’d better not act like you’re anything different. Besides, this is as close to a trophy of my roughneckin’ days as I’m gonna get.” He placed the hat prominently on a shelf and gave Zak the naked red hard hat, a pair of baggy rumpled-up overalls, gloves, and a never-worn yellow baseball cap with a Trans-Alaska Pipeline Project patch in the crown. They talked seriously about drilling for oil, Zak hanging on every word. Most of which he didn’t understand. Of course, there were some things he could understand. Things he was willing to risk an awful lot to get a taste of.
They talked about college, and Zak was startled to hear Calico say he was scared. He was scared of being the oldest guy in class. He was scared of taking a subordinate role to teachers he may not respect. “Jesus Zak, I’m used to smackin’ a wiseacre across the mouth. What if one of them cunts says somethin’ and I haul off and hit ’im before I know what I’m doin’?” He was scared of how smart the other students were. He was scared of books. He was scared of college girls. “Shit Zak, up there on the slopes, well, I’ve been payin’ for it for so long I don’t know if I remember how to talk a girl into it, y’know?”
“Just let the women take care of that, you won’t have to say much,” Zak laughed. “You’re older, been around, more mature, that’ll mean a lot. As for the books, all I can say is, read’m. If you’re vague on the meaning of a word, look it up. Even if you’re looking up two or more a page and it’s slowing you down to a crawl. Don’t take for granted that you know what the author is trying to say. Stick with it and the pace’ll soon pick up. In a month you’ll be in the same boat with everyone else. But you gotta hit’m hard and let everything else take a backseat. You’re a hard worker. You’ll be fine.”
At last, they fell asleep there in the living room, each resting his head against one of Calico’s duffel bags as the stereo played a side of Tonight the North Star Band over and over.
The next morning, as they were saying their goodbyes, Calico produced one more item fished from the depths of his roughneckin’ years. A beat-up copy of The People’s Almanac.
“Here, if you need to read somethin’ you can read this, it’s perfect for roughneckin’. It’s got a little of everything. Nothing in it is so long you can’t get something out of it during one good dump. And brother, that’s about all the time you’re gonna have for readin’. Besides, when them good ol’ farm boys see you reading something with the word almanac in it, they’ll figure you’re all right.
“Oh, and by the way,” Calico added as Zak fired up the Jeep and prepared to head West, “it’s not called a tower, but a tour.”
“Tour?”
“Yeah, like tour of duty, ’cept the way all these good old boys speak, different accents from all over, different variations of roughneck-redneck-ese, it comes out sounding like tower. And fuck, tower makes more sense really, but you should know, officially, it’s a tour, they’re interchangeable.”
“Tour, got it.”
“And Zak, don’t call me unless it’s an emergency, okay?” and then smiled warmly as Zak put ’er in gear. “Hey wait! Look, I want you to take this,” he said and dropped to one knee, rolled up his pant leg, and began to unbuckle a leather strap that wrapped around his shin. A moment later he handed Zak a beautiful leather scabbard from which Zak pulled a hand-made bowie knife with an elk-bone-and-aluminum handle. The name “Ruana” was etched into the blade at the base. “Be careful with that. It saved my life countless times. I don’t figure I’ll be needin’ too much life-saving in business school. You just take good care of it and it’ll take good care of you.”
“Hey buddy,” Zak said as the two clasped hands.
“Keep yer wits about you. Just remember what I said. Don’t take any chances. You’ll be livin’ from paycheck to paycheck out there. Hand to mouth. But you won’t owe nobody nothin’ and you can come and go when you please. If you think somebody’s got their ass up on their back you look’m right in the eye, keep your mouth shut, and wait for them to make the first move. If you think you’re in a bad situation—if that driller rides your ass too hard, or somebody says somethin’ you don’t like—you just twist off. Don’t think nothin’ of it neither. No need to explain nothin’ to nobody. You just walk off that floor, get your gear, hit that Jeep, and head ’em down the road. Come back a day or two later and pick up your check. It’s called bein’ free, Zak. And there ain’t nothin’ like it on God’s green earth. If I need you I’ll send a note to Watford City, care of General Delivery. Drop by the post office every now and then and check and see if there’s something there.”
“Will do.”
As Zak roared away, Calico let out a war whoop and raised his fists in the air. Zak stuck his fist out the window, and watched as his cousin got smaller and smaller in his sideview mirror.
AFTER A QUICK COUPLE OF breakfast sandwiches, some exercises, and his morning constitutional there in the big purple outhouse, Zak dragged the duffel bag Calico had given him out of the Jeep and fashioned a sofa-type backrest. He pulled off his shirt, doused his broad hairy chest with baby oil, and sat down to read in the glorious morning sun. With his jug of water beside him he flipped open The People’s Almanac. Calico had been right, as usual. In the intervening weeks Zak learned that on August 5th, 1914, the first traffic light in the United States was installed at Euclid Avenue and 105th Street, Cleveland, Ohio. That same year there were seventy-five thousand people killed on the job and another seven hundred thousand injured. He read about French auto driver Louis Chevrolet, and he learned about the many countries with populations smaller than the city of Baltimore. He read how, at the turn of the first millennium, devout Christians believed the world would end on that date and so traveled to Palestine to be on hand for the blessed event. Disappointed, they returned to Europe and told of their abuse at the hands of the Muslim Turks who reigned in the Holy Land. A crusade was begun to force them out. He read about Father Gourier who fed his guests overrich food, until it killed them. This morning, as he thumbed through the big fat paperback, he landed in the middle of a biography of George Washington and was just about to keep going until his eyes fell upon the subtitle, “Psychohistory,” and he paused, reminded of Asimov’s Foundation.
Mary Washington, hardly the perfect American mother depicted in schoolboy biographies, was a bad-tempered shrew who largely succeeded in her efforts to make George’s young life miserable. All of her children got away from her as soon as they could, and George was no exception. As her son advanced in the world, she openly resented his success, claiming that he thoughtlessly neglected her. She refused to participate in any ceremony honoring him (including his inauguration as president) and deprecated his
achievements. Emerging from this background, it is not surprising that Washington fell head over heels for a succession of young ladies, in hopes of winning the love and admiration he had been denied at home. Frustrated in love, and particularly for his hopeless passion for Sally Fairfax, Washington was similarly disappointed in the early stages of his military career. His father had died when George was a boy, and it was only natural that the shy, socially insecure youth should turn to warfare as a means of establishing his own manhood. But his first combat experience, when he was twenty-two, was an ill-managed fiasco for which young Colonel Washington was held personally responsible. It may be assumed that all these personal disasters contributed to the celebrated patience and perseverance that were among Washington’s most notable features in later life. He had learned that the only way to cope successfully with his environment was to gain rigid command of his own passionate nature.
“Georgie Porgie puddin’ ’n pie, kiss the girls and make them cry,” Zak could remember his own mother saying every time the first president’s name was mentioned. It was strangely comforting that the father of his country had not been appreciated and couldn’t stand the bullshit at home. Zak wondered if a deeper precedent hadn’t been set. Although Washington had swung the ax that separated the blossom from its contemptuous root, had George, a fatherless son, been the one to cleave the continental gap between generations as well? Was the transfer of power between generations the most violent struggle of all? Zak remembered the struggle his and other families suffered over the politics surrounding Vietnam. He considered Jesse Lancaster, mentor to Jon, Marty, Freddy, and himself, who could not inspire the same respect, admiration, or motivation in his own son. Was this a contemporary dilemma? Or was a more universal syndrome at play? Obsolescence is inevitable. Wisdom is scarce. Youth is invincible, and therefore blind.
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